Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 09:57:57 -0800 From: Joshua Houk <jlhouk-AT-attbi.com> Subject: Ralph Rumney, Artist and Avant-Gardist, Dies at 67 Ralph Rumney, Artist and Avant-Gardist, Dies at 67 By DOUGLAS MARTIN New York Times - March 31, 2002 Ralph Rumney, an English-born artist who romanced just about every eccentric left-wing intellectual movement he encountered over a half-century — and helped start a few — died on March 6 at his home in Manosque in the Provence region of France. He was 67. The cause was cancer, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported. Mr. Rumney founded no philosophical schools, nor did the art he produced so voluminously bear any important influence. But he displayed an uncanny knack for finding himself where intellectual cauldrons were bubbling, and tossing in some memorably zestful spice. In 1957, Mr. Rumney was a founding member of the Situationist International, a movement that mixed Surrealism, Marxism and sometimes spectacular hedonism and that has been described as the spiritual precursor to the Paris riots of 1968, the Sex Pistols and the sensationalist art of people like Damien Hirst. The tiny movement has remained a subject of fascination in France, where books on it appear regularly. Within months of the group's formation, at a weeklong meeting in a bar in Italy, Mr. Rumney was the first member to be expelled by the group's leader, Guy Debord, who had a penchant for excommunication. Forty-five of the 70 members were eventually expelled. But Mr. Rumney kept the faith and as late as 2000 called together Situationists and their fellow travelers from five countries for a month of drinking and debating in Manosque. "Ralph is a hero," said Michel Guet, leader of the Banalistes, a group of avant-garde artists, at the conclave. "He has refused to concede that the dreams of the old avant-gardes are finished. That is why artists will build monuments to him in the 21st century." The central belief of the Situationists, aside from the frequent denial that they had any beliefs at all, was that people were no longer participants in their own lives, but spectators. Reality, they said, was being replaced by images in what they called the "spectacular society." The situationists rejected art as an ornament of privilege and a commodity for consumption. Mr. Rumney agreed with his cohorts, and saw his finished art as a necessarily muddled reflection of his initial idea. But that somehow did not stop him from producing a vast outpouring of art over the years, from informal abstracts to large canvases using gold and silver leaf to plaster sculptures to Polaroid pictures and videos. One of his paintings hangs in the Tate Gallery in London, and he sold his work at shows, but he refused to take art completely seriously. He also insisted that no art could be truly original. "The greatest plagiarist of all-time was Picasso, who if he saw a good idea somewhere just took it and made it his own, in a flagrant manner," Mr. Rumney said in a book of interviews compiled by Alan Woods ("The Map Is Not the Territory," Manchester University Press, 2000). He was born on June 5, 1934, in Newcastle, where his father was an Anglican vicar. Anti-Establishment from the start, he was called a pervert by the Bishop of Leeds for ordering the complete works of the Marquis de Sade while still a schoolboy, according to an article in The Times of London in 2001. He attended boarding school, turned down a chance to attend Oxford, and dropped out of art school. He was expelled from the Young Communists for lack of moral rectitude. When he became a draft dodger, he fled to Paris, where he fell in with the Lettrists, a radical group led by Mr. Debord. He painted, but came to believe, with the Lettrists, that an artist does not have to make art; he himself never stopped, however. He returned to London, where he started a short-lived literary magazine, Other Voices. In 1957, he met the art collector Peggy Guggenheim at a show of his work in London, which led to an introduction to her daughter, Pegeen. He was so taken with her that he gave her the painting her mother had wanted to buy, "The Change," which now hangs in the Tate. They married a few years later. Later in 1957, the Situationist International was formed in a bar in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia. It combined the Lettrists with two other minuscule groups, one of them the London Psychogeographical Association, of which Mr. Rumney was the only member. His first and last assignment was to provide a report on the psychic geography of Venice. He proposed dyeing the Venice Lagoon a bright color. He said this would serve two purposes: to see how people reacted, and to study the flow and stagnation of the water. He never dyed the canal (though in the riotous year of 1968, someone else dyed it a bright green as a protest against capitalism) and he procrastinated on the written report he had promised. An exasperated Mr. Debord, who wanted to publish the document in an otherwise completed collection, exiled him. In 1967, Pegeen Guggenheim committed suicide in the couple's 17th-century house on the Île St. Louis, a tiny island in the River Seine in Paris. He is survived by their son, Sandro. In 1974, he married Mr. Debord's former wife, Michèle Bernstein, despite Mr. Debord's disapproval. They later divorced. After a lifetime of shuttling from London to Paris to Milan to Venice to the tiny island of Linosa, south of Sicily, he finally settled in the south of France. His small celebrity flickered anew when his autobiography, "Le Consul," appeared in French in 1999. An English translation is planned for this year by City Lights Publishers. He seemed never to lose his zeal for the avant-garde, even as he claimed not to believe in it. "We were fanatics," he said last year in a Times of London interview, "but we weren't wrong."
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